Overview
The Bill Schurk Sound Archives houses a substantial collection of fanzines - non-official, sometimes underground publications made by and for fans - related to popular music. While fan-created magazines have been around since at least the 1930s, music zines came out of the DIY ethos of the 1970s punk zine. Today, music zines cover many musical genres like punk rock, folk music, pop music, and extreme metal, as well as music in particular regions. Zines often contain record reviews, artist interviews, and live show reviews. Many zines document the habits of tech hobbyists or the activities of an underground music scene.
Because of the highly personal nature of zine writing, fanzines document the lives and opinions of music fans as well as the fan communities that they create. To scholars of popular music and culture, fanzines are a valuable resource to understand how people make use of popular music in their everyday lives.
The Bill Schurk Sound Archives fanzine collection also contains some other "grey" commercial material, like newsletters and free weekly magazines, since their content and publication structure is similar to fanzines.
How to Browse the ML/BSSA Fanzine Collection
You can browse all of the fanzines in the sound archives through this list in our catalog, where the zines appear in roughly alphabetical order. Additionally, you can search the catalog for keywords, titles or authors in combination with the word "zine" to bring up fanzines in the sound archives collection. They can also be searched with other subjects like science fiction periodicals, fantasy fiction periodicals, rock music periodicals, etc.
If you need assistance finding a particular type of content, please contact a librarian and we'd be happy to help! Contact us using the methods outlined in the "Need Help?" box on this page, or ask in person at the music information desk on the third floor of BGSU's Jerome Library.
Contact your Music Archivist
Credit
This guide was created by Rebekah Burchfield, graduate of the Ph.D. program in American Culture Studies and former ML/BSSA graduate assistant. It has since been updated by library associate Trinidad Linares and other MLBSSA staff.